Thoughts on New Work

It's been a slow start for me to start making new art this residency. I've made some of the suggested changes that were recommended during the January residency, but as for new work, nothing has completely clicked yet. I need more material to work with. I took several panoramics of the snow, which we have in abundance right now. Snow doesn't particularly inspire me. It can be a little difficult to photograph because of it's whiteness and possible glare, and the colors don't have the richness I enjoy. I did go up north this past weekend, and collected some image of the mountains and rivers while they were frozen, and visited an "ice castle" at a local ski lodge. Some of the results have possibilities:

The Ice Castle ones are interesting by themselves. I'm not sure how or if they would work in a montage.

These are a couple of my montage attempts so far. There's potential. I'm not sure about them. They're not hitting the mark yet. There isn't the strong sense of light that would bring make them alive. I might be able to work them over a little more to bring it out. The one on the left I fear is getting a little spider-like, and I wish I could make the chandlers look like they were swinging. I like it, but it needs something more. As for the snow castle piece, I like the sense of dusk, but I wonder about it feeling like Narnia too much. Also, when I had worked with my last mentor, we had talked about interior/exterior spaces, and the snow castle is all exterior.

     

For fun, to kind of shake things up, I tried this variation on the snow castle:

It seems like a popular design aesthetic right now to flatten shapes. Sometimes that trend appeals to me, but I don't see it as something I'll pursue, especially for the immediate. I'm more interested in naturalistic sense of depth, but I am interested in merging unexpected textures with architectural forms. It's simple in my sketchbook, but sometimes in the photo world, it's not right. It can get too busy or look forced.

My final thought for the night comes from looking at some of my panoramic source material from last semester. I saw three images from the same location next to each other in an interesting triptych.

It's too close to straight photography for me to work with comfortably. Too close to the facts to reveal the truth, or something like that, but they do seem to resonate. It reminds me of Noriko Furunishi's large photo collages. I like the proportion of scale and how the three work together even with different perspectives. Erik Johansson did a TED Talk and he said there were three main rules to photo manipulation: idea, same light, and same perspective. Obviously he speaking to a specific form of photo manipulation, but I feel inclined to not follow those rules.  His work is interesting, but borderlines on being shallow in my opinion. For example I love an image he has of a man laying down mirrors to reflect the city street he is on. Another image of him ironing the pants he is wearing however, feeling a little slap stick to me. I think that is the line I'm worried about, doing things because I can and being so involved in a technique that the content becomes less interesting. To have a sense of drama, but not to be like a Disney or Lord of the Rings movie. I'm not opposed to those impressions being present, but I don't want it to be simply entertaining and lacking depth.

One of the points of conversation I had during the January residency was about ruins, and a sense of decay. I've recently been reading some commentary on Romanticism and the movement's use of ruins. The sense of the organic, of decay appeals to me for similar reasons it appealed to the Romantics, and that is the idea that this is all temporal, and subject to change. I don't wish to be so heavy handed, but I've always had that tendency. I'm working on not needing to give the viewer everything.